


The Shape of Water

by Owlily



Category: Tales of Zestiria
Genre: Canon Compliant, Fluff without Plot, I mean if you ignore that we’re playing fast and very loose with how seraphim work, M/M, Porn with Feelings, bottom Meebo, feat. lightning seraph Sorey, not terribly explicit but you know, sort of vignettes? that sounds too sophisticated tho, the rest of the party has cameos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2021-01-16 11:15:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21270152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Owlily/pseuds/Owlily
Summary: Thought experiment: what if your boyfriend were literally made of water





	The Shape of Water

**Author's Note:**

> I’m not saying there’s too little content about the seraphim melting into their respective elements, but I’m absolutely saying there’s too little content about the seraphim melting into their respective elements.

  
The moment Sorey sank into the pillows in the inn bed, he felt a tiny spark of energy flow through his body and manifest as a blue ball of light that flickered like a cold flame. The feeling was welcome and familiar, but worrying because the spark of energy was supposed to be _stronger_. They’d been fighting hellions for hours and the moment they had fought off the last one in sight, Mikleo had all but collapsed back into Sorey’s body to recover.  
  
Mikleo materialized next to Sorey on the bed and immediately cradled himself up into a bundle, breathing heavily. He looked better than back out in the fields already, and apparently wasn’t hurt, either, but Sorey still felt the urge to drag him close and check up on him.  
  
“You okay?“ he asked, his voice small.  
  
Mikleo turned around to face him and nodded. “It’s okay. I keep telling you I recover much quicker than you do.” He buried his nose in Sorey’s shirt and a hand under it to search for cuts and bruises.  
  
Sorey let it happen. After a few slow, peaceful moments, he felt his skin cool and tingle with the familiar flow of Mikleo’s artes. A bit too intensely, he realised. His shirt was soaked and Mikleo was halfway draped over his body, halfway back into disappearing into Sorey’s head.  
  
(Or wherever the seraphim _actually_ resided when they disappeared into his body. Hearing their voices in his head didn’t necessarily mean that that’s where they hid. Maybe it was best not to actually know for sure. He used to say they’re in his heart, but Rose had laughed at him. Rude.)  
  
“Uhm, Mikleo? You’re melting.”  
  
It wasn’t a problem per se. He enjoyed it, too. Mikleo’s skin was always pleasantly cool, and soft like silk, and his presence was calming. However, Mikleo wasn’t completely used to being pact-bound to him yet, and Sorey had a feeling that Mikleo didn’t always _notice_ when he accidentally half-way vanished into his body.  
  
“I’m not soft serve leftovers,” Mikleo retorted.  
  
“I wouldn’t leave either of you aside.”  
  
“Sap,” Mikleo scolded, but didn’t do anything about their skin melting together. Sorey decided to let it slide, and as he drifted off to sleep, he felt his muscles aching less and the stings on his skin gone.  
  
He woke up well rested, with Mikleo still cradled up in his arms, and hearing knocks on the door.  
  
“Hey, sleepyheads, safe to come in?”  
  
Sorey had a quick look at the sun standing high outside, and down at Mikleo, who was groggily disentangling himself.  
  
“Come in!”  
  
Mikleo wasn’t good with mornings, but the moment Rose needed to yank the creaking door open and let herself in was enough for him to sit up and not be annoyed.  
  
“Feeling better?” Rose chirped and flopped down heavily on the bed next to them.  
  
Three people sitting up was about all the tiny bed could take, and it creaked dangerously. There was also little space left to move around, so Mikleo opted to stand up.  
  
“I’m perfectly fine for my part,” he declared, and pointedly ignored Sorey’s annoying little whine at the general loss of Mikleo.  
  
“Fine as well,” Sorey said, anyway. In the sense of no cuts and bruises left, at least.  
  
“Splendid! Breakfast’s ready! ” Lailah piped up, appearing at the door.  
  
Edna popped up behind her, taking a delicate little bite of a curry bun. It was probably her way of driving home the point. Dezel waved in the background.  
  
Sorey jumped a little. He had been so tired (and a little worried about Mikleo) the night before that he hadn’t really paid attention whether or not the other seraphim had disappeared back into him as well. He told himself to be proud that his spiritual powers had grown strong enough to not even notice the difference between zero seraphim and four seraphim, but truth was that it came with drawbacks. Like occasionally forgetting a person was there. Or three.  
  
In hindsight, it was quite polite of them to stay outside, although they must have been exhausted as well. “Thank you!” he chimed, and wouldn’t have been able to tell what exactly he was thanking them for, now – breakfast, or staying out all night.  
  
He shot one last worrying look at Mikleo while he got up from bed.  
  
Mikleo noticed, of course, and huffed in fake annoyance. “Yes, we can go eat. And yes, I’m perfectly well rested. You’re the best vessel I could think of.”  
  
“Except you never had any other one,” Sorey pointed out, but was grinning from ear to ear anyway.  
  
“But it's true!” Lailah chimed in. “Even most humans with resonance on par with yours aren’t used to our powers, so using them as a vessel space often feels cold and unwelcome. You can feel the uneasiness about the situation in their entire bodies. It’s different with you. You have a good heart, and a welcoming one.”  
  
She sucked in her breath and clearly had one or the other anecdote sitting on the tip of her tongue, but remembered just in time that she couldn’t speak about it if her life depended on it. How many shepherds did she quarrel with, and lose not because they weren’t physically or mentally strong enough to bear the burdens, but lacked resolve because their only ties to the seraphim were a natural gift they didn’t know what to do with…? How many of them hadn’t felt comfortable with Lailah’s flames burning into their skin and flowing through their veins like blood?  
  
It wasn’t a problem in _their_ group; Rose used to fondly call Lailah her favourite hot water bottle (even though she still got skittish from hearing the seraphim’s voices in her head). In corporeal form, Lailah’s skin was always on the edge of being too hot for comfort, like sitting too close to a bonfire. However, whenever she vanished into a brightly glowing ball of fire and back into her vessel space, Sorey found the temperature just right. Even if it felt like having swallowed a candle that now lit up your chest. It felt nicer than it sounded like. Maybe if those shepherds had trusted her a bit more…  
  
“What she’s saying is, you’re pretty comfortable,” Dezel said. “Unlike a certain someone else in this room, by the way.”  
  
Rose gave him a look. “Wow, guys. Up to now, this conversation was just going to be objectively creepy. Now you’re bad-mouthing me on top of it. Edna, say something.”  
  
Edna idly twirled her umbrella around and cocked her head to the side. “He’s okay.”  
  
Mikleo rose an eyebrow. “You spent the last millennium on that mountain, so do you actually know what other vessels feel like?”  
  
He expected that umbrella to jab at him, but Edna just turned away, hiding behind it.  
  
“I don’t. Which is the point, you dummy. I don’t just travel around with anyone and use them as a vessel. Not if I can help it.”  
  
Sorey beamed. Rose looked like she wanted to be anywhere else but here.  
  
Hopefully Rose would get used to it, too. Carrying the seraphim around was a bit weird, but not that unpleasant. Edna always had a very faint smell of flowers around her that got stronger when she was an orange energy ball melting into your skin. It became somehow private that way, so only you could smell it, nobody else. Sorey also felt firmer on his feet when she was with him. For all she claimed not to care, she felt like a protective shield around those she chose to grace with her presence.  
  
(The one presence that still felt odd to Sorey was Dezel, mostly because its presence was the lightest. Dezel always felt jittery, like ready to jump out of him at any given second. Mikleo and the girls didn’t. It didn’t really feel as rejection, just like mutually not knowing how to approach the other. He had made a mental note to ask Rose whether it was different for her, but somehow never felt like the moment was right.)  
  
Rose clapped her hands. “Anyway! Food! Please! So I can forget for a hot second how I ended up with the likes of you.”  
  
(She was jokingly complaining now, but smiling all the while, and Sorey knew she’d get used to it, eventually.)

* * *

Sorey and Mikleo had been raised with zero physical barriers, so they had never been good at keeping their hands and mouths off each other. On the other hand, their only source of information on human reproduction were trashy poems, and an environment of people that did not, and in fact could not reproduce.  
  
Mikleo never craved sex, or if he ever had, he had hidden the desire much better than he usually hid his desires. Sorey had been pretty okay with that. Not like he never thought about it. Not with how perfectly Mikleo’s body fitted against his whenever they huddled against each other. (Maybe it was a water seraph thing to flex your body into a shape that happened to fit like a glove. But Sorey was pretty sure it was a Mikleo thing.) But if Mikleo wasn’t interested, then he’d get by.  
  
So he was more than a little weird on all kinds of levels when they eventually tried. Not in a bad way, but in a way that left Sorey pretty clueless what Mikleo expected him to do; if he really knew himself. Maybe he didn’t. It would have explained a lot. He had been unfocused all day.  
  
Mikleo probably wasn’t to blame. Sorey had explained to him less than twenty-four hours ago that his plan to save the world was to willingly go into a coma he might never wake up from. Maybe it was to be expected that Mikleo’s brain short-circuited the slightest bit.  
  
Not that it mattered, judging by how desperately he clung to Sorey’s neck and shoulders. Sorey could have sworn he could feel Mikleo’s fingers digging into his skin until they seeped into it like ointment. Not much later it wasn’t just his fingers, it was Mikleo’s arms and legs taking shortcuts through Sorey’s body to get from one spot to another. He absently felt bits and pieces of Mikleo’s corporeal form collapsing into a soft blue light, leaving tiny droplets of water behind on his skin. He was tempted to turn his head and check, but Mikleo was squirming under him and chaining his eyes down to look at him.  
  
Every other minute a stray trail of water ran down his neck and he could never tell whether it was his own sweat or Mikleo’s artes going entirely out of control. By the time Mikleo’s eyes squeezed shut and his moans trailed off into a scream, he was positive it was the latter.  
  
Ultimately, it was cold where Mikleo’s fingers touched, primal, carnal in ways those trashy poems had not advertised, and Sorey was pretty sure his heart would have broken out of his chest had they kept this up for longer. He was ready to get a towel because he was sure to be dripping wet, but he was just a little sweaty. Apparently Mikleo’s control over his element was back in place in an instant. Or he had never lost it in the first place, and he had known all along that the water thing would drive Sorey insane. So they stay draped on top of each other a while longer.  
  
“I’ll be back. I promise,” Sorey said, breath heaving.  
  
Mikleo smiled up at him. His voice was small, but unbroken. “I know.”  
  


* * *

Mikleo had said that back then, and meant it, too, which didn’t make things easier.  
  
He seemed perfectly normal after the battle against Heldalf. Rose wished he didn’t. He smiled, he snarked at her (not in an aggressive way, just regular Mikleo snarks), he went to business as usual. The business was sealing off the area around Camlann, and thus rather unusual, but he was perfectly calm and collected while doing so, and somehow Rose wished he’d lose it. Comforting somebody who’s breaking down crying in front of you is somehow easier than trying to find out what could go on in a person’s head who is looking totally fine.  
  
He refused another sublord pact when Lailah made her new pact with Rose, but promised he’d still help whenever he could. Rose was okay with that, overall, but she felt like she was obliged to worry for Mikleo now. The place was no longer soaked in so much malevolence that it could turn a seraph into a dragon on the spot, but it wasn’t a vacation spot for seraphim without vessels, either. She was more than relieved when Zaveid offered to have an eye on him.  
  
She was even more relieved when, about two weeks later, after they had successfully secured the seal at Camlann and Mikleo was _finally_ willing to let the place be for a minute without casting nervous glances at it, he curled up in his and Sorey’s old room and didn’t come out for days.  
Under different circumstances it would have been troublesome, but Rose was convinced that it wasn’t good for anyone, and especially not for a seraph running around without a vessel, to bottle things up. In a weird way, this was the lesser evil.  
  
Natalie knocked at the door the first day, the other Elysians, Alisha, Rose and their seraphim companions watching from a distance. There was no answer. Apparently, water was seeping through the windows. Rose distantly worried about those myriads of books in that house getting soaked, and wondered at which point she had developed such a mindset. Natalie took care of it, so it was probably okay, but she distantly heard herself apologising in her head to Sorey that she had allowed his boyfriend to melt into a puddle and flood the house.  
  
They camped in Elysia for the next two days. It was pretty weird without Sorey around, and Mikleo curled up in his house all the time, so Rose felt a bit out of place at first. Until Lailah and Alisha presented her a creamy white coat with similar patterns to the one Sorey had worn and told her the Elysians had helped make it. Kyme told her to keep it, and wished her all the best on her shepherd’s journey. She felt the load of a mountain dropping off her shoulders.  
  
Mikleo left the house on the fourth day. He looked like nothing had happened, although there were dark circles under his eyes. Rose saluted him.  
  
“Yo. We’re leaving. Got malevolence to purify. Wanna hop on?” she asked in what she hoped was a casual tone.  
  
Mikleo smiled at her. “Sure. Why not.” He looked up and down the new item on her outfit.  
  
“Suits you,” he said eventually.  
  
He would be fine. Not always, but for a while.  
  


* * *

The first days after Sorey’s return should have been the happiest days in Mikleo’s entire life. The world was much more peaceful, much less malevolent, and he had all eternity to spend with his one and only to explore it. All his childhood fears had thankfully turned out to not come into reality.  
  
But that was the thing. It sounded too good to be true, and, in fact, all his instincts told Mikleo that it shouldn’t be. He had grown up knowing that someday he would lose Sorey because he was human and Mikleo was not. He had been mentally steeling himself for the day he’d die, all the while knowing that nothing, and no time in the world could ever prepare him for it.  
  
He had seen Rose die. She hadn’t been that old. He had seen Alisha die, old and withered, and proud but sad. He still remembered Gramps’ screams of agony before he and Sorey had put him out of his misery. He had held his mother in his arms before she thankfully had dissolved into mist instead of lying cold and heavy in his arms.  
  
His brain was trained to accept he tended to lose people he loved, as if it was personal between him and fate.  
  
(Zaveid had claimed he’d get used to it with older age. Maybe Zaveid was used to it, or pretended to be used to it by now, but Mikleo searched his own feelings and found that if old age would ever help him get used to loss, he wasn’t nearly old enough yet.)  
  
Whenever he held Sorey alive and well his arms, and giving him that sunshine smile worth a thousand summers coming and going, he smiled back, but his brain unhelpfully supplied that he was about to sacrifice himself for whatever cause again, and be lost to him forever, anyway.  
  
Sorey noticed, of course. He did the right thing, also of course. Which wasn’t anything specific. He was just there, very obviously not dying, not going anywhere without Mikleo, and not sacrificing himself for anything. Mikleo had spent centuries accepting that the person he loved most was gone and might never return, promise or no. So if would take centuries to imprint into his brain that Sorey was back and here to stay, then so be it. He’d help Mikleo no matter how long it’d take.  
  
Luckily, physical contact sped up the process. Dramatically.  
  
Sorey sat with his back to the headboard of the bed so he could comfortably squeeze his arms around Mikleo where he sat in his lap. One hand buried firmly in Mikleo’s cloudy hair, the other holding him so close to his chest it was a miracle either of them could breathe, biting and sucking into Mikleo’s throat, and his cock buried deep to the hilt in Mikleo’s ass. There was hardly any part of their bodies that wasn’t pressed against or inside each other. Mikleo needed the close contact like air.  
  
Sex wasn’t _necessary_, but as long as Mikleo wasn’t complaining, it was the best way to make him forget for a hot second that Sorey had ever been away, and how many people he had lost for real.  
  
Mikleo craned his neck up to give Sorey’s lips better access. Sorey’s hands trailed up and down his back and waist, carding through the locks of Mikleo’s hair all the time. Mikleo did his best to hold their balance by pressing his weight against Sorey and keeping his own arms in place around his shoulders, but lost a bit of control with every roll of Sorey’s hips into his body, slow, soft, and heavy.  
  
His back arched with every movement, and droplets of ice cold water began to form at the tips of his hair, flipping away with their movements and running down his back and under Sorey’s wandering fingers.  
  
“You’re still doing it.”  
  
“Doing what?” Mikleo asked hoarsely.  
  
“The water thing.”  
  
Before Mikleo could deny it, a particular hard thrust rocked his body and knocked the air out of his lungs. It was different from when Sorey had been human. His artes wouldn’t seep into Sorey’s skin anymore, he couldn’t just soak him with energy. Sorey was no longer completely corporeal, either. It took a while for Mikleo to get used to it, but it was objectively a good thing, and subjectively felt at least as amazing. Before he knew it, he felt himself lose shape the slightest bit, leaving trails of water whenever he moved, his chest heaving like waves on the ocean with every heartbeat.  
  
That was when the little sparks that sometimes tingled his skin where Sorey touched him turned into a bolt of lightning and shot through his body. Mikleo bit down on a scream and looked down at Sorey in shock.  
  
Sorey looked suitably abashed and abruptly stopped moving. Mikleo had trouble deciding whether he should be amused because the sight was adorable, or annoyed because he didn’t _want_ Sorey to stop moving.  
  
“Did you just electrocute me?” Mikleo asked, out of breath.  
  
Sorey pulled a hand out of Mikleo’s hair to bury in his own out of shame. “Sorry. That wasn’t supposed to happen.”  
  
Mikleo grunted in disapproval. “I didn’t tell you to stop moving.”  
  
“I don’t want to do it again!”  
  
“But _I_ want you to do it again.”  
  
Sorey tried to protest but was cut off by Mikleo catching his face between his hands and smushing their lips together. It took him a second to remember how to breathe before he moved his own hands back to Mikleo’s hips and thighs, and let it be. He was a bit self-conscious about not having a good grasp about his seraphic artes yet in general, but if Mikleo didn’t mind, why should he.  
  
Just as he felt Mikleo’s skin grow even smoother than in corporeal form and flow between his fingers in gentle, but uneven waves, his own body lit up and burst into sparks. Every movement caused another bolt of lightning to rush through Mikleo’s veins and ripped a moan from his throat.  
  
They were a thunderstorm on the loose. Mikleo had thought a lot about his own element in the past, and had been touched to discover that Sorey had inherited Gramps’. But these thoughts had been what he hoped was pretty rational and practical. Right now, all he could think about was how awfully convenient it was to be an element that conducts electricity, and to have his lover shooting lightning through his body that crawled into the tiniest molecules in his body and set every nerve on fire. It was less dangerous than it sounded. (He assumed, not truly caring.)  
  
In a way, it felt almost more intimate than the armatus had felt. Despite their successful efforts to synchronize, the flesh and bones of Sorey’s body had been like oil to him. They would mingle for a while, but wouldn’t mix properly.  
  
This was… something else.  
  
Maybe Mikleo could no longer simply turn into an energy ball and hide in Sorey’s body, but to feel their essences mingle like waves of light into one explosion of steel blue energy was its own kind of satisfying. He wasn’t sure anymore how well their bodies kept their shapes at this point, or whether they had just melted together like two candles on fire. As he opened his eyes for a bit and allowed his hands to wander up and down Sorey’s arms and back again, he was almost surprised that their bodies were apparently pressed close but still separate; well, in most parts. Here or there a thin twig of purple lightning was snaking up Mikleo’s hair or his veins where Sorey touched it, and Sorey’s blood was flowing in the rhythm Mikleo had commanded his heart to set.  
  
Whispers of “please” and “yes”, tumbled from Mikleo’s lips, which he would have felt embarrassed about, had he not been busy focusing on being boiled alive. Then again, Sorey was repeating his name in infinite loops by now, so at least their babblings were equally incoherent.  
  
Neither of them consciously took notice of his own orgasm; at they some point Mikleo just went limp and lazy in Sorey’s arms, moans slowly turning into purrs, and Sorey stopped moving to pull out of him as carefully as his exhaustion allowed. They ended up slumping down unceremoniously on the bed, and moving only as far as was necessary to finally let Sorey rest his back against the pillows instead of the headboard.  
  
Mikleo buried his head in Sorey’s chest. He felt like never moving again. Sorey smiled with his eyes closed, and a hand went back to carding through Mikleo’s hair.  
  
“Happy?” Sorey asked eventually.  
  
Mikleo cuddled harder in response, then dragged himself up on his forearms and pecked Sorey’s nose, smiling down. “Yeah. Yeah. I am.” A pause, then so quietly he wasn’t sure Sorey would even hear it, he added: “Thanks for keeping your promise.”  
  
But Sorey smiled back, brushing some hair out of Mikleo’s face, and all was okay. They would be okay.  
  
“Thanks for waiting.”

**Author's Note:**

> Me, knowing perfectly well that electric shocks do not actually feel good: jumps on the “what if Mikleo has a kink” train that circulated back then at some point
> 
> Self-beta’d, so pls be gentle with your insults  
Also kindly lemme know if you think this rather counts as E rating already… I wasn’t sure
> 
> Also big thanks to Quetz for contributing the title  
Fun fact, I haven’t seen the Shape of Water
> 
> By the way, illustrated fics are cancelled til my arms are better recovered and I don’t need two weeks for simple sketches. I am the one who suffers most from this.


End file.
